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In his unmistakable style, Friedrich Nietzsche approached the issue of all classes of values, not only the moral ones. The author presents Nietzsche as a philosopher of values par excellence by analysing vital and economic values, religious and political values, moral and aesthetic values, and, in addition to all these, value in general, with all its implications for human life and humanity. Nietzsche had an instinct for value, a faculty for feeling the finest nuances of the phenomenon of value, and a passion for knowing the axiological universe. These were extraordinary and have rarely been seen in the history of culture.

VI. Friedrich Nietzsche as Apostle of Arthur Schopenhauer

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1. The Church of Arthur Schopenhauer

When David Strauss said that Schopenhauer was not in his right mind, he was right, just like those contemporaries of Jesus who said of Him, according to the biblical text, that He was out of his mind (Mark 3:21). But Arthur Schopenhauer, like Jesus, is helped by a group of disciples, all of them being “poor in spirit” and dilettante in matters of philosophy, but hard as a rock in their faith to the new ‘Teacher’. Arthur Schopenhauer is, above all, a religious individual. His philosophy, as we will try to show throughout this essay, has essentially an eschatological function. This was noted by, among others, Johannes Volkelt, who characterizes Schopenhauer’s conception as a “redemptive philosophy” (Erlösungsphilosophie).225 The more profound is the awareness of the fact that the world in which we are living is the worst of all possible worlds, the more powerful is the philosopher’s need to save it. Arthur Schopenhauer’s theories about art, genius, sanctity, philosophy and the denial of the will to live, said Volkelt, have as their object the means and the ways by which man can be saved from temporality and materiality.226

Being a purely religious spirit, Arthur Schopenhauer never intended to found a philosophical school, but a church. He never had students, but disciples in the religious sense of the term ‘apprentices’, like those who followed Jesus, or, as he himself said many times, apostles and evangelists. I...

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